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by Lady_in_Red



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Feels, Bittersweet, Caretaking, Established Relationship, F/M, Ficlet, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 19:21:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21123911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_in_Red/pseuds/Lady_in_Red
Summary: Brienne goes to Tarth to care for her dying father.





	Home

The living room is dark when Brienne arrives home from the silly romantic comedy that failed to make her laugh. She tiptoes through the room, banging her shin on a table she's not expecting to be there. 

Her phone vibrates in her pocket, and she pulls it out eagerly, seeing exactly the name she wants on the screen. “Hey,” she says breathlessly, wishing he’d been sitting beside her in the cold movie theater.

"How's your dad doing?" Jaime’s voice is so full of concern and affection that it hurts even as it soothes her.

"He's dying." For Jaime, Brienne can’t manage the polite fiction she’s been spreading around town every time a well-meaning acquaintance asks.  _ He’s holding on. He’s a fighter. _

A heavy sigh. "Brienne." He didn’t want her to shoulder this alone, but she and her dad have always been a team. She needed this time with him, to just be them again. 

But this isn’t going how she expected. The house is the same, but not. Her father sleeps in a hospital bed in the den, his recliner shoved into the living room to make space. The hospice nurse is sleeping in his room. Brienne curls up in her childhood bed, the sheets smelling of the cheap laundry soap he buys because he thinks expensive detergent is a scam. The rest of the house smells wrong, disinfectant and the peppermints the nurse sucks all the time.

"He's so damn thin. I bought all his favorite foods. He takes a bite to make me happy but that's it." She keeps her voice low, desperate not to wake her father in the next room, and drops into his recliner. That, at least, still smells like the cigars he used to smoke, but it’s jarring how well she fits in his chair. In her memories it was always so big her feet didn’t touch the floor and she could curl up in it like a cat. 

"I could be there by morning. Just say the word." And he would. Jaime would ride to her rescue like a knight of old, but there are no dragons to slay here, just a tired old man wasting away beneath sheets white as a shroud.

She always thought dying would be dramatic, sudden. This long, slow fade to black is hard to handle. She wants to fight, needs her father to fight, but his fighting days are over. Victory is impossible and fighting would only prolong his pain. So Brienne watches, and waits, and burns for something to do so she won’t feel so damn helpless.

"No, it's okay,” she insists. “I don't want you to burn all your vacation time now." He will need it for the funeral, and for later. But she has trouble thinking past tonight, tomorrow.

“I could come up for the weekend, let Selwyn berate me for knocking up his perfect daughter. You know how much he loves to disapprove of me.” The humor in Jaime’s voice is forced, but his offer is genuine. 

Selwyn Tarth was not thrilled when his 25-year-old daughter took up with her 39-year-old colleague, and even less pleased when they moved in together a year later without any talk of marriage. Brienne ignored his carping for years, happy and unwilling to tempt fate by changing anything, until he got sick and she could no longer pretend he would live forever.

The baby was not so much an accident as a reaction to the news of her father’s prognosis. Jaime made no secret of his desire to have children, Brienne just wasn’t ready. Until her world was crashing down and all her reasons for waiting seemed petty. At first, there was hope that her dad would live long enough to meet his grandchild. His health rallied, his strength returned, and his memory lapses and mood swings stabilized for a time. But it didn’t last.

The next round of tests dashed their hopes, and suddenly the stupidly expensive 3D ultrasound she scoffed at when Jaime suggested it didn’t seem quite so decadent anymore. Jaime actually cried watching the ever-so-slightly creepy image moving around on the screen. A little girl with a wide mouth, a button nose, and very long legs. 

Brienne brought the DVD with her to Evenfall, so her dad could see the baby in motion. She also brought a baby name book, so he could help her think of names. It seemed like a good plan before she arrived, before she realized how brief his lucid spells had become. She managed to show him the video once, but even that memory was tainted.

“Today he thought I was Mom,” she admits.

“Oh, love,” Jaime sighs. “I’m so sorry.” 

She reaches over and pulls a blanket from a basket beside the recliner. There are still wiry brown hairs embedded in the wool from their old terrier, gone close to a decade now, and she remembers her dad napping in this chair with the little dog snoring in his lap. The house is so quiet she can hear cars on the main road, and the ticking of the clock on the mantel. The hospice nurse will come down soon to check on him, as she does periodically throughout the night. 

“How’s our girl today?” Jaime asks as she reclines the chair and tugs the blanket over herself. 

Brienne looks down at the massive expanse of her belly. To no one’s surprise the baby is measuring large. She’s been extra squirmy today, and right now her movements are making Brienne’s entire belly jump every few seconds. “She has the hiccups.” 

She hears typing on Jaime’s end of the line. “Let me just come out for the weekend. I can’t sleep without you here snoring.”

“I don’t snore.” At least, she doesn’t think she does.

Jaime chuckles, soft and warm and it does things to her heart. “Keep telling yourself that. I don’t care, I just want to hold you.”

“It’s only been three days.” She rubs one hand idly over her belly, and the baby kicks her hand. 

“Three days too long,” Jaime grumbles. 

“I miss you, too.” His hand in hers when she needs strength, his arms around her when the grief overwhelms her, his inappropriate humor when she needs to laugh. Being here, seeing her father so diminished, trying to make sense of the pile of bills and estate planning documents on his desk, she doesn’t want to do this alone anymore. 

“Can you really be here this weekend?” It’s tempting. 

“Of course. Thursday night even.” Jaime doesn’t even hesitate. As thoughtless as he can be at times, he moves heaven and earth for the people he loves.

“Then book a flight. Please.” Curled up in the dark, as comfortable as she can be lately, Brienne relaxes for the first time in months. She tells Jaime she loves him all the time. Admitting she needs him happens rarely. “Fair warning, though, my bed is tiny and the couch is terrible.”

“As long as you’re in it, I don’t care how small the bed is, Brienne.” 

Three days later, she is sitting on the loveseat in her father’s den, curled into Jaime’s side. Selwyn is sleeping, which is preferable to the agitation that has gripped him with more frequency lately. He was alert today just long enough to recognize Jaime, though he thought they’d just moved in together and lectured Jaime for ten minutes about how his daughter deserved more than just shacking up together. 

“We should get married,” Brienne says, squeezing Jaime’s hand. 

His lips rest against her temple. “For him?” He gestures at her father. 

“No, for us. For her.” She runs her free hand over her belly. The baby is quiet this morning, though her feet are lodged in Brienne’s ribs.

“I thought you never wanted to get married.” He says it neutrally, but she knows Jaime is traditional about commitment. 

She’s tired, too tired to dissemble. “I thought I could handle it, when you left, if we weren’t married. It would be easier that way. Cleaner.” In all these years, that thought never left her mind, that someday Jaime would walk away.

His hand is shaking when he tugs it out of her grasp to rest it on her belly. “I will never leave you, or our baby.”

Her voice shakes. “I can’t imagine doing any of this without you. I want to marry you. But it needs to be now, for him.” She looks at her dad again, the dark circles under his eyes, the loose skin over gaunt limbs. “It needs to be here. What do you say?” 

Jaime is crying even as he smiles at her. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Two weeks later, Jaime slides a ring on Brienne’s finger, a tension-set sapphire in a band of Valyrian steel. He confesses that it’s been hidden in their closet for years. Their friends and Tyrion stand around them in the orchard behind her dad’s house. Apple blossoms litter the ground and drift into everyone’s hair. 

Brienne’s father hasn’t been lucid all day, but they bring him out in his wheelchair anyway. He smiles and sings along with the septon and loudly whispers to Tyrion about what a nice young couple the bride and groom look like. He sleeps through most of the party afterward, and Brienne cries through all the speeches, but it’s the kind of perfect, sunkissed day she never dared to want. 

Six weeks later, against all odds, Brienne carefully nestles her daughter in her father’s arms. He hasn’t recognized Brienne in weeks, but he refuses to relinquish the baby for a long time, inspecting her tiny hands, cooing over her wide blue-grey eyes, gently touching the downy blonde curls on her sweet-smelling head. 

Within weeks he’ll be gone, but those last days aren’t what Brienne remembers. It’s this, this sharp sweet moment, when he looks up at her and smiles. 

**Author's Note:**

> I've left Selwyn's diagnosis vague because there a lot of ways to lose a parent before they actually pass away. The wedding was inspired by my brother-in-law's. The dirt backyard of a nursing home wasn't quite so picturesque as an orchard on Tarth, but the motivation was the same.


End file.
